Some would suggest that that’s equivalent to playing footsie with a bomb but Patrick Whittle dives in and offers a thoughtful critique of some of the overheated nonsense one can read in many science media:
If Black is not a meaningful category, why is “white”?
As Reich suggests, there is more than irony at work here. At the same time that critical race theorists and their supporters caution against “the myth of biological race,” the broad yet ill-defined racial term ‘white’ is used repeatedly — as in the SciAm article, for example: “white supremacy”, “white centering”, “white academics”, “white researchers”, “white people”.
This even extends, so the article suggests, to a “white perspective” (and a contrasting “non-white perspective”) on science and the world. Such an idea, though, is itself problematic: it implies that all white people share a single point of view, while all non-white people share another. That whiffs of race essentialism — the historically pernicious idea that each different ‘race’ has unique traits and characteristics distinguishing them from others.
A similar denial of race and yet fixation with race identity is central to modern CRT, which can be broadly defined as the belief “that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of color”.
Patrick Whittle, “Is science racist? Genetics, evolutionary human differences and ‘critical race theory’” at Genetic Literacy Project
The problem with Whittle’s long, thoughtful, and informative piece is that he seems determined to be reasonable and make sense. In the age of the war on math and the war on science, the Twitter mob is the new sanity and acting out is evidence of Virtue.
Note: He offers some entertaining as well as useful information on how much the Irish were despised in the 19th century. Yes, yes, but then, “No Irish Need Apply” became a music hall hit…
See also: American Humanist Association underbuses Richard Dawkins As a reader puts it: From anti-God hero to trans-racist zero… But the thing is, who cares about the American Humanist Association without people like Dawkins?